MTTS 2017 - Letter from the Programme Director to the applicants

If you are one are those unfortunate, I am sorry to hear that you are not selected for the programme.

If you are interested in attending mtts camps, you may visit mtts site periodically to check if any mini MTTS camp is organized in your region and apply for it.

Let me put forth some facts and statistics, and some guidelines we follow.

We receive about 3000+ applications for 180 seats (all camps and levels put together) in all.

Six Professors with years' of experience with MTTS spend 4 days (from 8 AM to 8 PM) to scrutinize the applications. (About half a dozen students and clerks help us in sorting out, cross checking, verifying the details etc.) At each level of each camp, we go through minimum of 4 rounds before we finalize the selection.

First preference is given to former participants of MTTS whose performance has been good. We depend very much on the consistency in academics and on the teacher's evaluation as he/she knows you better than we do.

As a rule, we do not select more than 2 students form any institution at each level. If you find more, it is perhaps many of them are former MTTS participants or local participants with good record.

MTTS being national programme, we try to make sure as many regions as possible are represented. We also pay special attention to remote areas, students from rural background, who do not get the kind of exposure or academic environment as their counterparts elsewhere.

Just a dozen of us have been working for MTTS for last 24 years with NO SUMMER Vacation. We are doing it as a service to the nation against all odds.

While we wish to have more camps like MTTS at many places in the country, elite academic institutes are not keen to lend their support by means of their faculty participation, making venues free etc., in spite of the fact they are the main beneficiaries of this programme.

MTTS faculty resides in the same campus for the entire duration of the programme and is present during ALL the lectures. They do not deliver their session and go away. This ensures individual attention to students.

Many mathematicians/teachers are not ready for this kind of selfless hard work as either it is physically and mentally demanding or they do not agree with our pedagogical model.

To remedy this situation, we floated the idea of mini MTTS to initiate students to the MTTS of way of learning and doing mathematics. Mini MTTS is for a shorter duration --- a week or two. Details can be found at the URL

Even here, elite institutes are not willing to extend a minimal support. We have to deploy our MTTS veterans again and again depriving them of whatever little rest they could get.

10. We are also aware that some of the selected students have a very genuine problem, namely the clash of dates of examinations, ill-health etc. Such students may not confirm of their participation or cancel it at the last minute. To avoid vacancies created by such incidents, we offer admission to 50-60 applicants though our sanctioned strength is 35 per level. Our experience shows that we rarely end up with vacancies, more often than not, more than 35 participate. We accommodate them by stretching the budget with no extra funding for the excess intake. Hence there is no point in your writing to us asking us to admit you because of you know of students who are not going to participate.

11. Note that there are about 6000+ autonomous institutions such as universities, colleges and institutes in our country. It would be impossible to find EVEN A SINGLE DAY which will be convenient to students of all these institutions. To mitigate such issues, we have floated the concept of miniMTTS whose major intake will be students of a region.

While I do understand your desire to participate, I cannot attend to each one of your requests. We are already spending too much time for this activity. If we have to keep answering hundreds of questions from students who were not selected, we would be too exhausted to continue with the Programme.

I hope you would understand and support our activity in whatever way you can.

Video taken from the MTTS 2011 camp at Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai

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